To quote myself on Twitter: Toy Story 3 also had a strange and confusing trailer in which Mr Potato Head was briefly a cucumber and had a poop joke made at his expense. That said, I look forward to some very familiar people attempting to "boycott" this movie because Bo Peep has pants now.

How does Pixar need success stories real bad right now? I guess in the last few years they have endured critical and financial failures like The Incredibles 2, Coco, Finding Dory and Inside Out.

The only angle I *could* think of is that Pixar "needs to prove" (and I'm putting that in quotes as hard as I can) they can release a hit without the oversight of John Lasseter. But he was already on a forced 'sabbatical' during the last few releases, so who knows how much, if any involvement he had in their recent critical and financial successes.

Same time frame: The Good Dinosaur, Cars 3 - both of which probably lost them money. Coco also, while a critical darling, probably didn't make nearly the amount of money they would have liked.

My understanding (and it maybe completely off, who knows!) as a friend of mine tells it - who was recently laid off at Pixar due to tough department downsizing - the business of making these films entirely in-house has also gotten a LOT more expensive over the past decade or so. And when your competition is making just as much, if not way more money than you and farming out production duties overseas bringing their price tags way down, it puts a LOT of pressure on Pixar as a studio.

Then there's the entire merchandise angle which is Disney's real bread and butter. So while classic movies like Up and Ratatouille that we all adore and think of fondly seem like successes in our eyes, Disney very much did not appreciate them since they were hard to make/market/sell merchandising for and were maybe not raking in money via its other revenue streams outside of the box office to merit the kinds of money it pumped into advertisement and merch for them.

It's just an increasingly tough industry, and its seeing the same problems that the rest of Hollywood, or that AAA gaming has with where it needs mega blockbusters to break even on these huge financial investments or else they're seen internally as failures. From my understanding - Pixar's business model for the past few decades has backed itself into that same corner.

The only angle I *could* think of is that Pixar "needs to prove" (and I'm putting that in quotes as hard as I can) they can release a hit without the oversight of John Lasseter. But he was already on a forced 'sabbatical' during the last few releases, so who knows how much, if any involvement he had in their recent critical and financial successes.

It's telling that Cars 3 is literally about the experience of women working in Pixar

I don't know what world you're living in, but the Cars franchise is both extremely profitable, and extremely merchandise-friendly.

The merch is definitely why Disney keeps pushing Pixar to make more Cars, but Cars 3 was the worst performing Pixar movie at the box office next to The Good Dinosaur, so that probably offset things significantly. From what I heard too, the production definitely sounded troubled/neglected as well. The director at the premier went on about how proud he was for the staff that cranked this movie out despite being given an abnormally short production schedule. Just sayin, the business side of these studios is really complicated and expensive, and Pixar - like the rest of the tech industry - is dealing with the growing pains as costs keep going up. I really don’t think it’s a coincidence that after Coco and Cars 3, their production schedule got disrupted and we’re seeing Incredibles 2 and Toy Story 4 back-to-back.

Quote:

Originally Posted by muteKi

It's telling that Cars 3 is literally about the experience of women working in Pixar

Lassiter wasn’t yet ousted for Cars 3; he was still present MCing the premier and hugging everyone. My understanding is that he’d been relatively hands off with Pixar over the last few years anyways since a lot of his attention was put in his duties getting Disney’s other animation outfits up to speed.